Monteray cannot play PNG movies!?

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Level 1

28 points

Monteray cannot play PNG movies!?

I have a massive Photos library of green screen effects I've been collecting for years. I'm not a pro - I just enjoy making fun movies with my kids, etc. After updating to Monteray however, the majority of .mov files will not open in Quicktime or in iMovie! I can play them in VLC, but if I want to use them in iMovie that doesn't help me. I compared the ones that do work with the ones that won't, and it seems that if they are JPEG movies, they're okay - but PNG videos will not work. I feel sick about this.

I went back to an older MacBook Pro and they worked fine in QuickLook, but I did notice that opening them in QuickTime (or iMovie) actually converted them to a prores format. Why can't they be converted by the newer QuickTime? Is Apple making it LESS capable? I don't understand why they would do that. These were all free clips found on various websites that I'm assuming use png for a transparent background. Handbrake won't convert to ProRes. I don't know how I'm going to be able to use my thousands of video clips anymore if I can't batch convert them. It seems like a pretty ubiquitous format, so I don't understand why Apple doesn't support it...nor why there aren't tons of people complaining about this...

Posted on Oct 13, 2022 2:30 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Matti Haveri

Level 6

14,742 points

Oct 13, 2022 11:36 PM in response to Th3Cr0w

Up to macOS 10.14 Mojave QuickTime Player nagged and automatically offered to convert old obsolete codecs. But no more.

I converted such old movies (.dv etc) with MPEG Streamclip and later with ffmpeg to new H.264/265 AAC movies.

ProRes files are quite large but you might try to convert to ProRes with a command like (you can make a batch command if this works):

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 3 -timecode 00:00:00:00 -c:a pcm_s16le output.mov

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Answer 2

Th3Cr0w Author

Level 1

28 points

Oct 17, 2022 9:55 PM in response to Matti Haveri

Thanks so much for your reply - I really appreciate it!

I'll try the code - thanks again. Indeed, I madly converted videos from old codecs, too - but I never got any notice about these videos. They've all been tagged, categorized, etc. in a Photos Library - took me forever to do, but I was so happy. Now I'll have to convert every video, losing all the work I put into organizing them. *sigh*. These aren't really old videos, and they were all in a QuickTime .mov wrapper; I wish Apple could've made this less painful. From my POV - and I'm a heavy, knowledgeable Mac user - this was very abrupt and surprising. I didn't see it coming at all.

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Answer 3

Oct 18, 2022 12:16 AM in response to Th3Cr0w

> They've all been tagged, categorized, etc. in a Photos Library - took me forever to do

If you have added much metadata in Photos.app, you can export it in a .xmp sidecar and use 3rd party tools like exiftool or GraphicConverter to insert it to the original files.

If you can convert and re-encode the original movies to a new codec, you might want to copy the metadata to the new movies by copying it either from the .xmp or the original movies with exiftool, for example something like:

Copy all from .mov to a same name .m4v in the same folder and set file dates:

exiftool -TagsFromFile '%-.0f.mov' -All:All *.m4v -execute '-FileCreateDate<QuickTime:CreateDate' '-FileModifyDate<QuickTime:CreateDate' -common_args -m -P -overwrite_original_in_place .

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Answer 4

Th3Cr0w Author

Level 1

28 points

Oct 18, 2022 6:55 PM in response to Matti Haveri

Matti - right now, you're my favourite person on the planet! Thank you so much for this information!

Cheers!

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Monteray cannot play PNG movies!?

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